Sunday, March 28, 2010

CHARACTERSROBERTA: 31 years old. Blue jeans, a cheap dress-up blouse that's gotten ratty. She's physically depleted, with nervous bright eyes.DANNY: 29 years old. Chinos and a pullover shirt. He's dark and powerful. He finds it difficult to meet Roberta's gaze.About both characters: They are violent and battered, inarticulate and yearning to speak, dangerous and vulnerable.

A DEFINITIONAn Apache Dance is a violent dance for two people, originated by the Parisian apaches. Parisian apaches are gangsters or ruffians.

STYLEThis play is emotionally real, but it does not take place in a realistic world. Only those scenic elements necessary to the action should be on stage. Only those areas that are played in should be lit.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

I know a guy who knows a guy who caught a couple off the point. Way off the point. So far off he couldn't see the point anymore. He caught them using what works way out—the only thing that's ever worked that far out, according to the guy I know who knows the guy who knows.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn't. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth. Jean Rhys

Sunday, March 14, 2010

It's so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won't be awake for another five hours, but I can't help feeling that we're sharing this clear and beautiful morning. Jonathan Safran Foer

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, “I’m going to pee…”; hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking, talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes, the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3am; being told you snore, hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce, but always carrying on, seeing it through…Charles Bukowski via Melancholia.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. - Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

"When I do come into contact with children, I find them a disconcertingly tough audience. They care not for blurb or kudos, literary allusion or postmodern antics. Instead, they study every inch of a thing and are bluntly honest about it." Shaun Tan